The monsoon had recently ended, leaving the jungle green but foetid. On its far side, palms had been cleared to build a factory, but the breeze-block building had never been finished. The village was so perfect that it could even keep progress at bay. Madame Nghor agreed to rent us the property for one month. The price seemed absurdly low, but maybe it was extortionate to her. We didn’t really care.
We checked out of the Borei Angkor, the fancy hotel where we had only met other Americans, and moved right in to the tiny house. When we got in the taxi to leave, the driver automatically assumed we were heading to the airport and very nearly dropped us there. He was real surprised when we redirected him into the countryside.
Our tickets home were open so there was nothing else to do but tell our family that we had decided to stay on awhile. Gail thought we were behaving kind of weirdly but Redmond congratulated us when we told him.
“I won’t be making many more calls,” I warned him. “The charger we brought with us doesn’t work out here. But we have our health and our money, and the change is doing Dorothy a world of good.”
“Just don’t go native on us, Dad,” Redmond laughed.
Obviously, staying in the house was very different to being in the hotel. There were no fresh towels or little gifts on the pillow, and there was no room service or air conditioning, but we loved it all the same. Madame Nghor offered to prepare food for us, and we took up her kind offer. On our second day, she called around with the other villagers to formally welcome us. The women peeped shyly around the door and wouldn’t come in. The men sat in a circle outside and offered us a strong, sour yellow drink they’d made themselves. I didn’t like it much but it wouldn’t have been right to refuse it.
We were sad to see so many of their children missing an arm or a leg. They danced about dextrously with just a stick or two to lean on, and Dorothy and I felt compelled to give them a few coins even though we knew we shouldn’t. There was this kid called Pran, a skinny little runt about seven years old, who had lost both his legs and one arm. There were still thousands of landmines buried in the countryside around the village, and we were warned about straying from the marked paths when cycling to the next village for provisions. The damage of war always outlives the fighting, sometimes in ways we can never imagine.
The younger villagers spoke some English, and all were anxious to ensure that we would have a happy stay. Madame Nghor was especially thoughtful, and would bring us small gifts – a mosquito coil, candles, a hand fan – anything she could think of that might make our stay more comfortable. Her husband had died in tragic circumstances – I heard from one of the villagers that he had been murdered by a Khmer resistance unit about fifteen years earlier – and pain was etched deeply in her face, but now her life was simple and safe and she made the best of it; her story, we felt, was to have a happy ending. She and the villagers lived by the principles enshrined by their religion, peace and acceptance and harmony, and we found it a humbling contrast to the way we lived at home. You try to do the right thing but life in the West is complicated and hypocritical.
There were times when we felt like disoriented Westerners, not understanding what we were seeing. On a trip into Siem Reap we saw a fight explode out of nowhere between two men who were whisked away so quickly by police that I feared for their survival in the cells. Then, an hour later, we saw them in a café together laughing and drinking. Some of the food gave us fiery stomach cramps – we weren’t used to eating such quantities of spiced vegetables without any dairy products – and the insects particularly plagued Dorothy, who would find herself bitten even though she tightly wrapped herself at sunset from head to foot. One night as I watched this ritual of protection, I found myself fearing for her. She seemed so much more fragile here. Dorothy caught me looking, and told me not to fuss. She always had confidence in me.
The bugs were at their worst after a humid rainstorm broke across our new home one night. They flew into the shutters at such a lick I thought they might crack the wood. The next morning the warm, still pools under our decking were filled with giant centipedes and every type of crawling creature, some with pincers, some with horns and stingers, many as big as an adult fist. I shifted one multi-legged horror from the bedroom with a stick, and it caught me by surprise when its shiny black carapace split open and two vibrating iridescent green wings folded out. It lifted lazily into the air like a cargo plane, and I guided it toward an open window.
The following evening we opened a bottle of warm red wine and sat beside each other on the rickety wooden terrace, watching the sunset, Dorothy and I. Silence fell easily between us, but it was also a time for asking things we had avoided discussing all of our married life.
“Tell me,” she said after a long pause for thought. “Do you ever regret working for the doctor?”
It was a question I had asked myself many times. “I was young,” I replied. “I was ambitious. We were denied information. We didn’t know many of the things we know now.”
“But if you had known, would you still have worked for him?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“Because there were others who stood their ground.” There was no reproach in her voice.
“They knew more than I ever did. He kept us in the dark.”
“You knew about the carpet bombing. Everyone in Washington knew.”
“We didn’t know what it would lead to. How could we? But to answer your question – no, I wouldn’t have worked for Kissinger.”
As we were dressing, Madame Nghor brought us a ceramic pot and shyly set it on the low dining table. She looked uncomfortable about bringing it. “This for protection – for—” and here she rolled one forefinger over the other in an explanation I could not understand. I looked into the pot and found it contained an oily red butter that smelled like copper and petrol.
“How do I use this?” I asked.
“Not for you,” she told me gently, “for your wife.”
I figured that explained her awkwardness. For the last day or so Dorothy had been suffering from cramps. Madame Nghor held her hand out over the edge of the floor and made a soothing flat-palmed gesture.
“Put it on at night. You rub it like this to stop them from coming,” and again she did the finger-rolling thing that I took to be an indication of cramps. “You have no trouble from them after, they stop and die. You must keep lid on pot tight. You want me to show?” I thought she looked mighty uncomfortable with what she regarded to be a personal subject, and by this time her embarrassment had spread to me, so I hastily thanked her and showed her out.
We were planning our first trip into the jungle, but Dorothy had not slept well, and was still in some pain. “We’ll postpone it to another time,” I told her. “Besides, it’s been raining and now it’s hot again, so God knows what kind of insects will be out and about.”
“No, we’ll go. I feel a lot better now, really. I’m not going to be a killjoy on this trip.” I explained to her about rubbing on Madame Nghor’s home-made potion but it seemed too oily and liable to stain, so she decided it would be better to use it when we got back. After tucking our shirts and socks tightly into our trousers and boots so that no insect could find a way in, we set off into the woodlands, clambering over great tree roots, stopping to listen to the calling of birds in the jungle canopy. The going was a lot tougher than we had expected, and after an hour we decided to turn back.
We had been hoping to stumble across one of the many overgrown temples that lay almost entirely buried by the returning jungle, and in one patch of cleared ground I rubbed away a layer of thick green moss to find the scarred stone face of an Apsara dancer staring up at me through the soft soil. With her raised eyes appearing above the leaves, it looked like she had been swimming through the grass and had just broken through the surface. As if she had been waiting for someone to come along and awaken her.
“You’ve let the sunlight fall on her face again,” said Dorothy.
“We could unc
over the rest of her,” I suggested.
“You don’t understand. The moss was protecting her from damage.”
We walked on. Dorothy was particularly exhausted by the journey, so we stopped by a stream and listened to the sounds of the forest.
“We should have done this years ago,” I said, taking her hand. Dorothy’s hair had greyed a little and she had tied it back into a ponytail, but in the yellow light that fell through the branches she looked blonde again.
“The time was never right before, you know that,” she replied. “At least we got to do it now.”
She looked down at her boots, lost in thought. There was a leathery scuffle of wings, and a bird screamed high above us, then it was silent once more. The stream was so clear that you could count the pebbles on the bottom. Dorothy looked down at her white tube sock and began to rub it. “Damn.”
“What’s the matter?’
“Nothing, maybe a scratch.” I looked and saw a small crimson stain the size of a penny. “I don’t think anything could have got in, these socks are really thick. I’d have felt it.”
“Better let me have a look.” I rolled down her sock. It was full of blood. “I think you got a leech in there,” I told her. “It won’t hurt, but we’d better get you back.” I knew that leeches produced an anaesthetic in their bite so they could continue to suck their host’s blood without being felt. They also have an anticoagulant in their saliva, so they can carry on feeding until they’re fully gorged. Then they drop from the body to seek water, through which they can travel to find a new host.
“It could have carried on and on without me knowing it was there,” said Dorothy.
“No,” I told her. “In the natural world parasites don’t kill their hosts, because they’d ultimately kill themselves.”
“You mean it’s only humans who do that.”
Soon the cover thinned out and the jungle opened on to a road that led back to the village. As soon as we reached the house we took off our socks and shoes. I found one leech attached to my ankle, and Dorothy had two. They were small and black, as soft as slugs but far more elastic and lively. They left splattery trails of blood as they twisted about on the bathroom floor. I stamped on their bloated bodies, sacs of blood that burst messily over the cracked white tiles. I had a sudden suspicion that there might be more of them on us.
“Turn around,” I told Dorothy. “Take off your shirt.” As she peeled off the wet cotton, I saw two more on her back, between her pale shoulder blades.
When she saw the thin streaks of unclotted blood in the mirror, Dorothy yelped. I picked off one of the creatures and examined it. As I did, it stretched and swung around, trying to bite me. I was surprised at the speed with which it moved. I could see two sets of tiny hooks like pinpoints, set on either end of its body. When I dropped it on to the sink it flipped over, end to end, like a slinky. It climbed the sheer sides of the bowl in seconds and disappeared into a wet corner.
“Let me light a cigarette,” I told Dorothy, “I think you’re supposed to burn them off.’
“No,” she said, trying to sound unpanicked, “they bite deeper if you do that and tear the skin when you pull them. I think you’re meant to flick them off with a fingernail.” She had read about them in her travel guide, and was right. A nail under the leech’s body was enough to make it come away. My back was clear – I think they found Dorothy’s blood sweeter. The harder part was catching them once they fell. You expect anything that looks like a slug to move slowly. I placed my finger above one and watched as it stretched and waved about like an antenna, desperate to reach me. There was something grotesque about its obviousness, as if I was automatic ally expected to forgive its uncontrollable hunger.
The sun was setting and the sky had turned a spectacular shade of crimson. Out on the balcony, the warm moist air was thick with flying insects. I felt as if our environment had subtly turned against us, as if it was saying We’ve nearly had enough of you tourists now, time to go home. You’ve pretended to be like us but you really don’t belong here.
Dorothy was tired and in unusually low spirits. She hardly ate anything from the tray of pork and noodles Madame Nghor had left for us. She was still suffering from muscle cramps, and opened the pot of oily rust-coloured ointment, patiently rubbing it into the tops of her legs and over her belly until the room stank.
My calves and thigh muscles were sore from the expedition. We were not so young now, I thought, and would have to make adjustments to the way we behaved. It had been foolish of us to just take off into the jungle like that without telling anyone where we were going – what if we had gotten lost, what would we have done? Just how quickly could things go wrong here?
I turned out the lights and we went to bed. The blackness was complete, but soon I saw lightning crackle above the treeline. It looked like an electric trolley was running through the forest. The temperature started to climb, and within minutes it was unbearable. Dorothy was twisting and turning in her narrow bed. I was sweating heavily, and could not get comfortable. I went for a smoke on the terrace and stood at the rail, listening to the noises of the night.
Dorothy’s questions about my life had bothered me. There were no easy answers. Had Kissinger’s illegal bombing of this astonishing country opened the way for everything that followed? We went into other countries and created a vacuum that had to be filled by something. Every day took us further away from being the innocents we had so long pretended to be.
I reached the end of the Marlboro packet. I left the terrace door wide to let some air in and came back inside. It seemed more stifling than ever. I lay down on top of the bed once more.
An hour later, rain broke and fell hard, pounding on the roof of the little house. The temperature began to fall. It rained and rained until the sky wore itself out. Calm returned, and I must have dozed.
Dorothy cried out suddenly, making me start. I tried to find a light, but it seemed the electricity was out, and the candles were somewhere in the other room. I knew at once that something was amiss.
Dorothy was struggling to sit up. She called for me and I grabbed at her wrist, only to find her skin slick with sweat. “What’s the matter?” I kept asking. I probably frightened her with my shouting. I found my lighter, flicked it and tore back the thin sheet. Her nightdress was stained scarlet, and the material was shifting as if alive. I could smell something bad, like an infected open wound. She and I scrabbled to tear off the wet material.
As it ripped, I saw what was wrong; the area from her navel to the tops of her thighs was a black squirming mass of tiny bodies, slick and shiny with her blood. Leeches, it seemed that there were hundreds of them, sucking her life away from her.
I thrust my hand into them and instantly they began to flip on to my wrist and arm, attaching themselves, finding veins and biting hard. Dorothy screamed as I grabbed at them, trying to squeeze whole handfuls at a time, but they slipped through my blood-slick fingers. As fast as I flicked them away they came back, driven by their hunger for blood.
I needed something else. Finding the lighter, I struck it and thrust the flame into the wriggling slimy nest. Too late, I remembered that the ointment contained petrol. There was a soft pop of ignition and she was enveloped in thin blue flames. I grabbed my shirt and threw it over her stomach.
In the moment before the flickering flames were extinguished, I saw the horrific mess on her body, blood and burned leeches writhing everywhere, Dorothy shaking in pain and terror, and I . . .
It shames me to think back to that moment. All I could think about when I saw her was the roaring anger of the blame, someone to blame. Madame Nghor had given us the oil, she had somehow discovered who I was, who I had worked for in Washington, and had made up this concoction to draw the leeches to us. She was taking revenge for the loss of her husband, for the destruction of her country, for me being an American. That was my first reaction, the seeking of blame.
The screams brought Madame Nghor – and half the village – to ou
r door. She put on the light, and I realized that in my panic I had simply failed to find the switch. I thought she had come to gloat and take pleasure in this bizarre revenge, and I must have rushed at her. I remember grabbing her thin shoulders and shaking her very hard. Two men who turned out to be her sons ran forward and pulled me away from her.
“What did you do to my wife?” I yelled in her face, “What did you do?” I said some other things that it pains me now to remember. When she saw the pulsing mass of leeches that still quivered and crawled on Dorothy, Madame Nghor ran back down the steps and returned with something that looked like a can of lighter fluid, squeezing it wildly all around until every last one of the leeches had fallen away and shrivelled up.
Chaos. In the exposing glare of the overhead bulb, my wife lay sobbing, bloody and naked on the bed before the shocked villagers. I stayed frozen in one place until Madame Nghor had pulled a sheet over her.
“You stupid man,” she scolded, wagging a cartoonish finger at me. “This all your fault, not mine! This! This!” She picked up the pot she had given us. “You put it on—” and when she made the smoothing gesture again I realized she meant I should put the oil on the floor, along the edges of the room, to keep the leeches out after the storm. It was not meant to be put on the skin. And the rolling fingers, she was simply showing us how the leeches moved and why it must be applied. I had misinterpreted so blindly, so badly. One of her sons dipped his finger in the mixture to show me. The thick red oil had cattle blood in it. The coppery smell attracted them, and they got stuck.
In shame and shock I started to laugh. I couldn’t stop myself. Was this really how things went wrong in the world? Were mistakes always this fundamentally stupid? How could I have thought this tiny village woman might know I once worked for a political oppressor? It was absurd. Guilt, like some barely-visible fish resting in deep water, could surface without warning.
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